It’s mostly young people for the first few years, but then we get older ones, the kind we used to call grey nomads. They would take six months, a year, out of their lives in other places, to pack everything up and drive the lap of the country. Clapstone’s a tangent, so it only ever attracted a few eccentrics before, the type who had to see every inch, or the special interest ones who took a detour for the cuttlefish. Now a lot of them are living out of their caravans, just driving, never going home.
The older people don’t find meeting us so embarrassing. They like to have a chat, ask about good places to camp around here, tell us about how bad the roads are nowadays, wonder at the dwindling birds. They tell us there must be some food source, or a weather issue, or a dip in this particular breeding season; there’s always a cause. They tell us there are good years and bad years everywhere, and some places just aren’t recovering. They tell us the relocation policies are not as harsh as some people say. It’s a kind of freedom, really, when someone else decides it’s time to go. Liberating, finding out you didn’t need a house, a mortgage, all that junk.
One day a group of women come, three of them squeezed across the front bench seat of an antique station wagon. The whole back is full of boxes. After they’ve gone around the park they come to take pictures of us. They shake our hands and then they ask us if we’re doing okay, like we’re old relatives of theirs. But maybe that’s just their way of talking.
‘It’s a wonder the DSC hasn’t moved you,’ one of the women says. Grey curls balance on her forehead. The skin beneath them crinkles with dark lines.
‘Yes,’ we say. ‘It sure is.’
There’s a long pause.
‘What’s the DSC?’ asks Fiona.
‘You know,’ the woman says. ‘Sustainable Communities.’
‘Ah,’ we say. They keep changing the name.
‘The government,’ says the second woman, tall, impatient.
‘They don’t know,’ says the third. ‘Don’t worry them.’
‘It’s not the government’s land,’ says Jean. ‘It belongs to a private company.’ We’re sure she doesn’t mean to sound dismissive. But the women just look bemused.
There’s an awkward silence.
‘I mean it’s probably somebody’s land, originally,’ Fiona says.
‘Don’t you know whose country you’re on?’ The tall woman puts her hands on her hips and we feel ourselves move slightly closer together. Quayde hangs on to the back of his mother’s leg, a fat white shadow. She nearly steps on him, and he makes a worried, breathy sound.
We always thought Clapstone had an Indigenous ring to it, sort of like clapsticks, but now that we think about it, it probably doesn’t.
‘Well,’ says the tall one, glancing at her friends. ‘This place. I’d be careful if I was you. It’s got really bad dreaming.’
We huddle now, bumping against each other. We try to read their faces. The two younger women look at us with mournful eyes, then one of them tries to hide a smile behind her hand.
‘Stop it,’ the other whispers.
The tall one bats a hand at us, like a bear. ‘I’m just having a go at you. We’re from New South Wales.’ Her friends release their laughter. Our own surrendering hands become a feeble wave as they get back in their station wagon, and we hear the laughter disappear into the dust.
Busy seasons come and go, and we adapt to them. We get used to the plumes of dust appearing on the road, to the craned necks and raised phones, to answering the same handful of questions. The older demographic likes to pause and wonder. But after a while the older tourists start to dry up as well, soaking away like water into cracked ground. There are days, then weeks, then months when nobody comes, and the kind that do are sometimes just here to break things.
‘Maybe it’s this weird weather,’ says Allan. It has been windy lately; they say the patterns are moving.
‘Fuel shortages,’ says Jean. Certainly that must be part of it.
‘The novelty’s worn off,’ says Roger, who’s upset. The surge in online traffic didn’t last, and hasn’t been repeated. He takes the loss too personally. ‘People move on to the next thing. They forget about you.’ He doesn’t take so many pictures any more, though recently there’s been a run of sunsets.
Even Belemnite Enterprises has forgotten us, apparently, because we haven’t heard anything more from them. We keep the letters folded in the top drawers of our cabinets, and still nobody comes to talk to us about our brighter future, or our remaining debts. We settle into a peaceful routine, safe beneath our dome. We’re protected from the changing winds, real and economic. And if we hear things breaking in the night sometimes, we don’t worry; like the barking of the dogs, they are much too far away to concern us.
We hear that Ash and Snow found work up north, exploring for gas. They come to say a solemn goodbye. In worse times we’d be sending boys like that to war; now they go again into the landscape. We wish them all the best, and we wonder what Jill will do. Surely she can’t stay here forever. She’s living more or less on her own in that barn; since tourism has slowed, we suppose she can manage the work quite easily, but it must be lonely. There’s Sam, but she’s not – well. She isn’t like other people. We hardly ever see Sam out and about. She lives in that old house now like an animal lives in its burrow, like a grub snuggled into a cocoon. We think she’s ashamed to show her face.
As for us, at our age, we like the quiet. We become accustomed to a bit of solitude; over the years, we adapt to it. So when the trucks come, we’re shy at first. We watch through our blinds.
A single white ute with orange lights on the roof leads the way. After it, four large, blue semi-trailers come trundling down the main road, strange equipment like obscure farm machinery piled on the back. The road needs maintenance; we can hear their gears grinding and engines straining as they heave over the potholes and ditches. Maybe they’ve come to do something about it. But they drive on into Clapstone.
Then we think maybe they’re here for the park; it could be another rehabilitation project. They’re going to take the last of the buildings down, demolish the wheel. They’ll take it away for scrap metal, which must be all it’s good for now. Quietly, we think it is time it was all dismantled; vandals have done enough damage, and those flimsy buildings are just about ready to fall down. But instead of continuing to the park, the trucks turn along Samphire, then up the run-down track to the Aspco plant. To the reserve, we should say, where the plant used to be. Before it was revitalised.
That’s what the map says, but it isn’t really a reserve. It’s just a weedy paddock now, slowly eroding. The line of gums that used to mark the river’s edge have all turned grey. Some have fallen in as the banks decayed; termites are turning others to dust. We don’t go up there much because there’s nothing there worth looking at. But we can’t see what the trucks are up to from our front rooms.
We walk. The air is good and it isn’t far and we’re frugal with our fuel these days. The road is overgrown now, patches of old asphalt crumbling below the grass, rocks that have wandered across it somehow. We follow the track through the weeds towards the white ute. It’s a new model, electric, still factory-clean. There’s a reflective sticker-stripe around the tray, but no government coat of arms, and no logo, as far as we can see.
There’s a man leaning on it. He doesn’t look like a supervisor; for a start, he’s not watching anything except his feet. He’s dressed informally in jeans and sneakers, orange safety vest hanging open over a polo shirt, greying beard. He looks a bit annoyed when he lifts his head to see us coming up the path, but the vest makes us feel entitled to approach him.
‘Nice day,’ we say.
He nods, glances over at the trucks. They have clustered around a specific place and are unloading some of the equipment. They must be planning to sleep up here, because they’ve brought their own swags and everything.
‘What’s happening here?’ we ask him. ‘If you don’t mind us asking.’
He frowns, spits something out from behind his teeth. ‘Drilling,’ he says.
‘Drilling what?’ we ask.
He looks at us like we’re idiots. ‘Holes,’ he says. His neck is short, rows of whiskers stuck in it like tiny pins in a pincushion. One lower tooth is a gap.
‘What are you, a mining company?’ we ask.
He shakes his head. ‘Just doing some testing.’ The neck bunches. He looks at a small orange box on his belt with lights and numbers on it.
‘What kind of testing?’
He frowns at his box. ‘Geological.’
We were sure that all this ground had been investigated already, a long time ago, and found to be worthless. Ed spent months running it through tests, back in the day. It occurs to us that there are new kinds of metals now, rarer earths, and many shortages. Plus, technology is always advancing. Could be there’s a resource here we didn’t know about back then, or a new way to extract it.
That would certainly change things.
‘Are you from Belemnite?’ Allan asks him, sounding out the name uncertainly.
There’s a little insignia on the polo shirt, just visible under the vest, but he moves quickly so we can’t see it. ‘Yeah-nah,’ he says, and prods between his teeth with a fingernail.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Jean asks, gesturing at the other workers setting up their machines.
‘Issues,’ he says. The nail emerges, is examined. Goes back to work.
‘What sort of issues?’
He makes an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I just look after the trucks,’ he says. ‘You got a beef with the company, you’d have to take it up with them yourself. It’s all mandated.’ Then he turns his back on us and starts fidgeting with something in the tray, and even though he’s only clicking and unclicking an ocky strap from one of the hooks, we get the message. It’s time for us to go.
On our way home we notice several scraps of green plastic lying around, and we’re about to go back and complain to him about the workers littering, but then we recognise the colour, shredded and faded. They’re the tubes from Ed’s tree-planting, all those years ago. It’s amazing they’ve survived all this time, especially given that none of the plants have.